


A Price Above Rubies

by feldman



Category: To Catch a Thief (1955)
Genre: F/M, aged and mellow, hot blooded texans
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-28
Updated: 2019-07-28
Packaged: 2020-07-23 13:37:38
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,079
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20009176
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/feldman/pseuds/feldman
Summary: “Francie is like lemonade,” Jessie had told him after dinner that first night, on the terrace where he’d originally seduced her name from Hughson. “She’s cold, and she can be tart, but she’s sweet in equal measure.”John sipped his port until she stopped looking at the view, until she turned her head and tucked a loose curl behind her ear so she could study him with both eyes. He’d smirked down at her and drawled, “Lemonade gives me heartburn.”





	A Price Above Rubies

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Thassalia](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Thassalia/gifts).



> One day I woke up to find part of my brain writing the One True Pairing of To Catch a Thief, and so I went with it. For my Thea.

“Francie is like lemonade,” Jessie had told him after dinner that first night, on the terrace where he’d originally seduced her name from Hughson. “She’s cold, and she can be tart, but she’s sweet in equal measure.”

John sipped his port until she stopped looking at the view, until she turned her head and tucked a loose curl behind her ear so she could study him with both eyes. He’d smirked down at her and drawled, “Lemonade gives me heartburn.”

Jessie had given him a sly nod, like he’d best remember that for his own good, and turned the conversation with the frankness her daughter found so embarrassing. “Myself, I’m coffee. A bracing pick-me-up.”

“Strong and complex.”

“Best in the morning.”

“To be fair, I think you could also keep a man up all night.”

She threw back her head and laughed, and John grinned, delighted and a little woozy, because that laugh was what he’d been aiming for.

Later that night he’d reflected that she would never believe him that she was champagne.

~*~

Jessie could buy John’s villa and twenty more up and down the Riviera if she wanted. Instead, once she catches up on her sleep, she gets up before dawn and makes biscuits for the first time in two decades.

Germaine makes something with ham and eggs and some greenery from the garden, and talks about the occupation and the resistance, about cooking for a German general and biding her time, like a woman throwing scraps to pigs she knows won’t see the winter. Jessie understands that patient ruthless practicality. After she struck oil, she saw a few of the same men that she’d charmed in a gaudy parlor a lifetime before, and knew exactly how to play them like a hand of cards.

The coffee is strong, and the biscuits are pretty good for rusty hands and foreign flour, and Jessie tells her about being seventeen when Jeremiah took her out of that house in Houston and brought her to a shack in Slaughter. 

“Dirt poor, as in even our dirt was poor. Living on love is a hard scrabble life, but I was young enough for both of us, and we were happy most of the time. When Francie came along, Jeremiah said she was a blessing, but I knew she had to be stubborn as all get out. None of the other babies could take it, you see, they didn’t stick. I thought it was because of me, that I was poor dirt to grow anything in. But Frances came out hollering, and hasn’t stopped correcting me since. She saved me, when Jeremiah died.”

~*~

When John returned from the train station, empty hands in his pockets as he strolled back up the winding lane, Jessie was baking bread with Germaine.

“Oh she’ll be back,” she flicked a chiding hand, dusty with flour. “It’s normal to get itchy feet once you have a home to come back to.”

Germaine paused in slicing the tops of her loaves, and remarked that they now had a blonde cat to go with the black one.

Jessie laughed, because she didn’t speak French but she understood it, she’d had to learn it to understand her daughter, after all. Jessie laughed, because she didn’t want John to take it personally that he’d been discarded. Jessie laughed because Francine had left her as well, and it was a harrowing bittersweet relief, and what else was she gonna do, cry because her baby was breaking hearts all the way to Paris?

John hung poised between fleeting kisses like childish dares and that rebellious laugh, and Germaine gave him a look like he was a dough that had failed to prove. He performed a resigned smile as he replied, “Well I guess a mouse is no fun once they stop putting up a fight.”

“Only to a cat,” Jessie winked.

John snagged the garden shears off the hook on the wall and fled outside to the comfort of playing idle gentleman, that laugh erupting behind him like champagne and gunfire in equal measure.

~*~

John opened his safe, stout and cemented into a corner of the cellar, to once more pack it full of jewels that don’t belong to him. Jessie no longer needed to flash her bona fides to be allowed into the same circles her daughter moved in.

Francie was safe in Paris, and hopefully Paris was safe from her. Germaine had pointed out that both mother and daughter were free of the respectability they wore to deserve each other, that daughter could storm Bohemia while mother…and the rest of the sentiment was expressed in a playful shrug as she folded butter and dough together like closing a book.

John shared this sentiment with Jessie as they toted boxes down into the cellar, and there’d been tears in her eyes as she’d chuckled, “I worked very hard to make sure that girl never wanted for shoes, but I guess dancing barefoot in a Parisian cafe doesn’t really count against me, does it?”

“I’m sure she’s writing scads of poetry.”

“Wouldn’t hurt her to throw in a postcard now and then,” Jessie smoothed her palm across the top velvet box of a stack a foot tall, “I’d even settle for a bawdy limerick.”

“As your host, I’d be happy to oblige you,” John swung open the safe door, “Once we safely stow away your passports for the more tony circles, we’re free to be as vulgar as you’re comfortable with.”

Jessie went quiet at that, her eyes fixed on her hands meticulously fixing the nap of the velvet to hew in one direction, and she told him, “I met Jeremiah in a whorehouse.”

John turned to face her fully, to gently take the boxes and set them on a wine rack. There was so much implied and unsaid, all he could do was risk a bit of himself in return. “When I was nine I stopped running away from home. I ran away _to_ the _circus_ instead."

She met his eyes and then nodded slowly. Understanding, sorrow, pride, and affection played across her features where her smile should be.

John felt each emotion like fingers around his wrist, a solid grip swinging him safely in midair. He grinned, “Well, we both seem to have gotten by alright, in the end.”

Jessie chuckled, “That we have."

He slipped his fingers through hers, and she let him slip her jewels into his safe.


End file.
